I am having major problems getting a Django app installed on an Ubuntu machine running Django 1.10.6.

I am used to using an older version of Django and now I cannot get my webapp to install. Here is the situation:

I have a Django project called myproject. The file structure is:

(BASEDIR)/manage.py
(BASEDIR)/mycommon/    # I will discuss mycommon below
(BASEDIR)/myproject/
(BASEDIR)/myproject/settings.py
(BASEDIR)/myproject/urls.py
(BASEDIR)/myproject/views.py
(BASEDIR)/myproject/wsgi.py
(BASEDIR)/myproject/models/
(BASEDIR)/myproject/models/__init__.py
(BASEDIR)/myproject/models/models.py

It turns out that for this project I need to put my models in a common package because there is another python application (using Twisted that bootstraps Django) that needs to access these models. I will call this package "mycommon". So my "real" models are here:

(BASEDIR)/mycommon/
(BASEDIR)/mycommon/utils.py
(BASEDIR)/mycommon/models/
(BASEDIR)/mycommon/models/__init__.py
(BASEDIR)/mycommon/models/models.py

So the Django settings file is in (BASEDIR)/myproject/settings.py and the INSTALLED_APPS parameter is set to this:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
'myproject.models',
'django.contrib.auth',
'django.contrib.contenttypes',
'django.contrib.sessions',
'django.contrib.messages',
'django.contrib.staticfiles',
'django.contrib.admin',
)

Finally, note that myproject/models/models.py is very simple, since it just uses the mycommon models:

from django.db import models
from mycommon.models.models import *

So far so good, this is a structure that works fine on older Django versions. Anyway, I start with an empty MYSQL database (created but empty) and now I go back to (BASEDIR) and run this:

python manage.py makemigrations mycommon.models

Unfortunately I get an error like this:

RuntimeError: Model class mycommon.models.models.SomeModel doesn't declare an explicit app_label and isn't in an application in INSTALLED_APPS.

So what am I doing wrong?